A luminaire (light fixture) is a device comprising at least one lamp for emitting illumination, and any associated socket, support and/or housing. A luminaire may take any of a variety of forms, such as a conventional ceiling or wall mounted luminaire, free standing luminaire or wall washer, or a less conventional form such as an illumination source built into a surface or an item of furniture, or any other type of lighting device for emitting illumination into an environment. The lamp refers to an individual light-emitting component within a luminaire, of which there may be one or more per luminaire. The lamp may also take any of a number of forms, such as an LED-based lamp, a gas-discharge lamp, or a filament bulb. An increasingly popular form of lamp is a retrofittable LED-based lamp comprising one or more LEDs as the means by which to emit illumination, but being made retrofittable into a luminaire designed for a traditional filament bulb or fluorescent tube.
A luminaire or even an individual lamp may also be equipped with a wireless communication interface allowing the luminaire or lamp to be controlled remotely by lighting control commands received from a user device such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, or wireless wall-switch; and/or based on sensor readings received from one or more remote sensors. Nowadays, the communication interface can be included directly within the lamp itself (e.g. in the end-cap of a retrofittable replacement for a filament bulb or fluorescent tube). For example this can allow a user, through the user device, to turn the lamp's illumination on and off, to dim the illumination level up or down, to change the colour of the emitted illumination, and/or to create a dynamic (time varying) lighting effect. In one form, the communication interface is configured to receive the lighting control commands and/or to share sensor data via a local, short-range radio access technology such as Wi-Fi, 802.15.4, ZigBee or Bluetooth. Such lamps may sometimes be referred to as “connected” lamps.
One type of connected lamp is an instant-fit “tube LED” (TLED) lamp which retrofits into a luminaire designed for traditional fluorescent tubes. According to the instant-fit TLED approach, the existing fixed-output fluorescent ballast, the TLED lamp-holders and also all the electrical wiring within the luminaire remain unchanged. Via straightforward re-lamping, existing “dumb” fluorescent tubes (or even “dumb” TLED tubes) can be exchanged with dimmable connected TLEDs each having an individual, integrated wireless radio.
However, a project to replace all the old-fashioned tubes in an office with TLEDs, or the like, will require a commissioning process.
Consider the process of commissioning an arrangement of wireless luminaires in which the wireless interface is included in each luminaire's housing on a per luminaire basis (as opposed to a wireless interface being included in each individual wireless lamp). To do this, the commissioning technician has to stand underneath each luminaire that he or she intends to commission (or in visible vicinity of it), and select what he or she believes to be that luminaire on the user interface of a commissioning tool (e.g. a dedicated commissioning device or a commissioning application running on a mobile user terminal such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop). The commissioning tool then broadcasts a commissioning request comprising an identifier of the selected luminaire, and in response the luminaire having that identifier will emit a visual indication (e.g. by blinking via its lamp(s) or a separate indicator light). This way the technician can check whether the selected luminaire is indeed the luminaire that he or she intends to commission. If so, the technician then confirms this to the commissioning tool, and in response the tool adds the confirmed luminaire to a wireless network for controlling the lights in a subsequent operational phase. The commissioning technician then repeats this for each luminaire to be commissioned (e.g. every luminaire in the office).
As alternative, sometimes also pointing methods are applied to identify a specific luminaire during the commissioning process. One example is an infrared remote control being directly pointed to the luminaire featuring an infrared receiver. Another method is to select a luminaire by shining a high-powered torchlight into the daylight sensor of a specific luminaire.